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Thursday, July 13, 2017

School of Harm - Maenadic Studies

School of Harm … Maenadic Studies *

Regarding artists, Plato saw in them no invention, unless inspired and out of their senses. Inspiration, incidentallybestowed - in the Plato’s own time – by a divine troop of discipline-specific Muses; figurative personifications and exclusive franchisers of creative genius.

Plato stipulated insensibility as essential prerequisite of divine inspiration. I like to fancy the philosopher imagining such obligatory insentience along Apollonian lines. Envisioning, perchance, vital inspirational swoons unspooling in what one might think of as neoclassical style. Spontaneous divination, attending on cerebral abstention – serially eventuating within a colonnadedrotunda, awash with even, Arcadian, light.

A space, symmetrically picketed by genre specific effigies and furnished with tastefully appointed fainting lounges. The sum of its aesthetic and psychological portions designed to encourage accommodative inward-turning and mortal downscaling of oversized sacred energies. Discarnate consummation, germinating and birthing physical creation. Creation, of course, minus somatic exertion or emotional histrionics, of the kind I entertain a happy appetite for.

I speak to the sorts of squalid, orgiastic, convulsions often typified by more barbaric states of possession and creative birth. Ludicrously savage states of captivation, like the Dionysian-flavouredfrenzy-and-transport attached to popular notions of middle-period modern artists. As in the caricaturish artist-manqués (and their creative paroxysms) one chances upon in New Yorker cartoons and Mad Magazine parodies.

Is any caricature more perennially hardy - or as ubiquitous - than stereotypical depictions of bohemian picture-painters? We’ve all seen, and been drolly amused by, these laughable, easel-orbiting dervishes, lost in a private, careering pas de deux, with whatever ‘god-mad’ inspiration topped their contemporary-painting dance-card of the cultural-moment.Most of us are familiar with this apparitional, beret-and-smock-wearing artist. A parodic character, far removed from any sort of steady, Apollonian, inner-thrummings.

Conversely, what we have here, is a spirit-drunk puck, unthinkingly engaged in a no-holds-barred, and potentially self-destructive, tango with real and imagined elemental forces, dressed up as demigods. In ungainly and mortal struggle with an immortal tag-team of Maenadic suitors or, perhaps, adversaries. An artist, wholly lost to the world, to himself, to any possibility of impulse-buffering domesticity … in fact, publicly averse to all governing restraint. An artist - to paraphrase Maslow - who is - merely animal - an animal transcending.

So, what might this essay’s mythopoetic carry-on have to do with the purportedly allegorical paintings on show? These newest works continue on an elliptically sui generis path of preposterousness, provocation and impiety – contending with typically dead-earnest (and, to my mind, dead-end) aesthetic concerns and conceptual ‘issues’, currently obsessing the outward-turning, gray-matter-alphas of the art world.

While the paintings feature, in most cases, spatially believable, planar-floors. And, at times, the sort of low-rent moiré-patterned wood grain walls found in trailer-homes and budget motels, such ur-quotidian detail serves, perversely, as shabby-chic foil to the painting’s even more tawdry optical (atmospherically metaphysical) contrivances. More often than not, consisting of spectral incursions by non-naturalistic light and color – democratically alluding to visionary states, lustrous natural phenomenon, or Las Vegas’ neon-borealis.

What does all of this add up to, you might ask. Well, nothing, that is, to do with any real, or explicit, fixed meaning. The paintings’ agenda is simply retinal and cerebral delight – of an unfixable (open ended narrative) category. While alluding to and borrowing (magpie like) from all sorts of affiliate association. The paintings, in their final testimony, substantiate and attest only to the hoary outlaw-biker credo – sworn to fun, loyal to none.

* my essay (unpublished) for the exhibition of the same name @ Suite Gallery, Wellington

Lately

Expat American living and working in New Zealand.
I have a long-established painting practice and
occasionally write criticism for Art in America, Sculpture, Art New Zealand and ARTNET - among others.
Where I come from the only people who read visual art criticism and review are the artist ,his dealer and the artist's mother.